Facts and Values

The Ethics and Metaphysics of Normativity

Giancarlo Marchetti, Sarin Marchetti, Giancarlo Marchetti, Sarin Marchetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317354673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This collection offers a synoptic view of current philosophical debates concerning the relationship between facts and values, bringing together a wide spectrum of contributors committed to testing the validity of this dichotomy, exploring alternatives, and assessing their implications. The assumption that facts and values inhabit distinct, unbridgeable conceptual and experiential domains has long dominated scientific and philosophical discourse, but this separation has been seriously called into question from a number of corners. The original essays here collected offer a diversity of responses to fact-value dichotomy, including contributions from Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam who are rightly credited with revitalizing philosophical interest in this alleged opposition. Both they, and many of our contributors, are in agreement that the relationship between epistemic developments and evaluative attitudes cannot be framed as a conflict between descriptive and normative understanding. Each chapter demonstrates how and why contrapositions between science and ethics, between facts and values, and between objective and subjective are false dichotomies. Values cannot simply be separated from reason. Facts and Values will therefore prove essential reading for analytic and continental philosophers alike, for theorists of ethics and meta-ethics, and for philosophers of economics and law.

Part I

A Counter-History of the Dichotomy

1 The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Future of Philosophy¹

Hilary Putnam

1 Introduction

The present essay is titled “The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Future of Philosophy.” I did not entitle it “The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Future of Pragmatism” because I do not want to revive pragmatism as a movement. I don’t believe in “movements” in philosophy, except as temporary expedients for bringing new ideas to the attention of the philosophical public. But there are ideas in classical pragmatism that I think deserve to be part of “the future of philosophy.” The rejection of the claim that there is an absolute dichotomy between descriptions of facts and value judgments is perhaps the most important idea of Deweyan pragmatism that I hope philosophers will come to accept in the future.

This dichotomy has by now become something familiar to lay people and not just a matter for discussion by philosophers and social scientists. Every one of us has heard someone ask, “Is that supposed to be a fact or a value judgment?” The presupposition of the question is that if it’s a “value judgment” it can’t possibly be a “fact,” and, all too often, a further presupposition is that value judgments are “subjective.”

This dichotomy was already widely accepted by analytic philosophers when I was a graduate student more than a half-century ago. The logical positivists, including my teacher Hans Reichenbach, claimed to have shown that ethical propositions only appear to be bona fide assertions; in reality, they lack truth-value, they said, and, indeed, they are outside the sphere of rational argument altogether. Important social scientists accepted the dichotomy as well; Lionel Robbins, one of the most influential economists of the 1930s, gave this view one of its most aggressive formulations:

If we disagree about ends it is a case of thy blood or mine—or live or let live according to the importance of the difference, or the relative strength of our opponents. But if we disagree about means, then scientific analysis can often help us resolve our differences. If we disagree about the morality of the taking of interest (and we understand what we are talking about), then there is no room for argument.

(Robbins 1932, 132)

Yet this “self-evident” dichotomy is one that Dewey regards as baseless:

Articles frequently appear that discuss the relation of fact and value. If the subject discussed under this caption were the relation of value-facts to other facts, there would not be the assumption of uniqueness just mentioned. But anyone reading articles devoted to discussion of this issue will note that it is an issue or problem just because it is held that propositions about values are somehow of a unique sort, being inherently marked off from propositions about facts. I can think of nothing more likely to be clarifying in the present confused state of the subject than an explicit statement of the grounds upon which it is assumed that propositions about values are not propositions about space-time facts, together with explicit discussion of the consequences of that position. If a question were raised about the relation of geological propositions to astronomical propositions, or of meteor-propositions to comet-propositions, it would not occur to anyone that the ‘problem’ was other than that of the connection between two sets of facts. It is my conviction that nothing would better clarify the present unsatisfactory state of discussion of value than definite and explicit statement of the reasons why the case is supposed to be otherwise in respect to value.

(Dewey 1944, 106)

By “propositions about values” Dewey means here not just propositions about which human beings or communities have what values under what circumstances—sociological or psychological propositions—but propositions about what is valuable. Now that the fact/value dichotomy has become so widely accepted, it may appear naïve of Dewey to claim that there can be facts about values. How can there be facts about what is and what is not valuable? What is more, Dewey suggests that such facts are just “space-time facts,” that is, they do not depend on anything supernatural or “non-natural.” (And he wrote this in 1944, long after G. E. Moore argued in his famous Principia Ethica, published in 1903, that if there are such facts, they must involve a “non-natural property”!)

But Dewey was not naïve. He knew very well that his was a minority position. The first sentence of the essay from which I just quoted reads: “When I analyze the discouragement I have experienced lately in connection with discussion of value, I find that it proceeds from the feeling that little headway is being made in determining the questions or issues fundamentally involved rather than from the fact that the views I personally hold have not received general approval” (Dewey 1944, 101). Let us see what Dewey meant by “the questions or issues fundamentally involved.”

The fundamental idea in all of Dewey’s writing about the theory of value was to distinguish between what is valued in the sense of evoking a mere feeling of liking or enjoyment, and that which has been critically evaluated and studied. In Dewey’s view, it is only when we have acquired knowledge of the relevant causes and effects and relations to our other values and our doings that what is valued become valuable or what is satisfying become satisfactory. Or, as he himself puts it:

To say that something satisfies is to report an isolated finality. To say that it is satisfactory is to define it in its connections and interactions. The fact that it pleases or is immediately congenial poses a problem to judgment. How shall the satisfaction be rated? Is it a value or is it not? Is it something to be prized and cherished, to be enjoyed? Not stern moralists alone but everyday experience informs us that finding satisfaction in a thing may be a warning, a summons to be on the lookout for consequences. To declare something satisfactory is to assert that it meets specifiable conditions.

(Dewey 1929, 208)

It is because he consistently rejected the idea that attitudes such as liking, preferring, approving, commending, and the like are sufficient to constitute value, and because he wished to emphasize the role of intelligent evaluation in value judgment that he offered what he called a “preliminary rough listing” of the questions he thought we should be discussing in the essay I mentioned earlier (Dewey 1944, 101–2). Here is Dewey’s list:

1. What connection is there, if any, between an attitude that will be called prizing or holding dear and desiring, liking, interest, enjoying, etc.?
2. Irrespective of which of the above-named attitudes is taken to be primary, is it by itself a sufficient condition for the existence of values? Or, while it is a necessary condition, is a further condition, of the nature of valuation or appraisal, required?
3. Whatever the answer to the second question, is there anything in the nature of appraisal, evaluation, as judgment or/and proposition, that marks them off, with respect to their logical or their scientific status, from other propositions or judgments? Or are such distinctive properties as they possess wholly an affair of their subject-matter—as we might speak of astronomical and geological propositions without implying that there is any difference between them qua propositions?
4. Is the scientific method of inquiry, in its broad sense applicable in determination of judgments and/or propositions in the way of valuations or appraisals? Or is there something inherent in the nature of values as subject-matter that precludes the application of such method?

—And, very importantly, in connection with the fourth of these questions, Dewey tells us that he inserted the phrase “in its broad sense” after “the scientific method of inquiry” to make it clear that the word “scientific” is “not assumed in advance to signify reduction to physical or biological terms, but, as is the case with scientific investigations of concrete matters generally, leaves the scope of the subject-matter to be determined in the course of inquiry” (Ivi, 102).

Dewey’s responses, in his work as a whole, to the four questions he raised in this short article will be my topic. But first I want to look at certain well-known philosophical views that are diametrically opposed to Dewey’s.

2 Dewey’s Naturalist Opponents

One sort of opponent that Dewey recognizes but does not discuss in “Some Questions About Value” is the non-naturalist, the philosopher who holds that value propositions presuppose a non-natural or “transcendent” source of knowledge; in a footnote to that essay he writes that that view has been omitted “so what is said will not appeal to those who hold that view” (Ivi, 101). In a sense, the work of both Dewey and James (cf. James 1897) is intended to show us that (1) assuming that we need a transcendent justification for value propositions is only to make them seem occult, and they are anything but that—they are rooted in real natural facts about human nature and about real human environments; and that (2) those who take the “transcendent” route in ethics have historically been opponents of fallibilism in ethics, and fallibilism, for pragmatists, is inseparable from democratic ethics.

So this essay is addressed to naturalists in ethics. Dewey was well aware that among his fellow naturalists there were philosophers who regard ethical utterances as “pseudo-propositions.”

In The Unity of Science, for example, after explaining that all nonscientific problems are “a confusion of … pseudoproblems” (Carnap 1934, 22), Rudolf Carnap wrote as follows:

All statements belonging to Metaphysics, regulative Ethics, and (metaphysical) Epistemology … are in fact unverifiable and, therefore, unscientific. In the Viennese Circle, we are accustomed to describe such statements as nonsense … This terminology is to be understood as implying a logical, not to say a psychological distinction; its use is intended to assert only that the statements in question do not possess a certain logical characteristic common to all proper scientific statements [i.e. verifiability—HP]; we do not intend to assert the impossibility of associating any conceptions or images with these logically invalid statements. Conceptions can be associated with any arbitrarily compounded series of words; and metaphysical statements are richly evocative of associations and feelings both in authors and readers.

(Carnap 1934, 22)

And Dewey discusses this view (although he does not mention Carnap by name) in “Some Questions About Value.” How then, could Dewey write (in the very same article) the words I quoted earlier, namely, “It is my conviction that nothing would better clarify the present unsatisfactory state of discussion of value than definite and explicit statement of the reasons why the case is supposed to be otherwise in respect to value”? Didn’t Carnap “state the reasons?”

Well, Carnap did give a supposed reason. He said that value propositions “are in fact unverifiable.” This is certainly a reason that Dewey would have accepted, had Dewey agreed that it was the case. But the only reason Carnap had for saying that value propositions are unverifiable in 1934, the year that The Unity of Science was published, was the claim, accepted by the Logical Positivists and their “Vienna Circle” at that time, that the only verifiable propositions are observation reports such as “this chair is blue” (or, in an alternative version, “I have a blue sense-datum”) and logical consequences of such propositions—a claim so extreme as to rule out all of the propositions of theoretical physics, as Carnap later came to realize. (cf. Putnam 2002, 22–3) From Dewey’s perspective this is no reason at all.

Other defenders of the “emotivist” or “expressivist” account of ethical sentences simply claimed that it was the very “grammar” of ethical sentences to express emotions or “attitudes” (or, in Hans Reichenbach’s version, to “command”), and not to state facts. But this is certainly not the surface grammar of such utterances: we do speak of some valuations as correct or true and others as incorrect or false, and we also discuss whether they are warranted or unwarranted. The emotivists’ reply was that the surface grammar is “misleading,” but again Dewey would want to hear a reason for this claim that a non-reductive naturalist should accept, and he claimed (and I think that he was right) that no such reason had been offered. (That one can be a naturalist in philosophy without being a reductionist is another idea of the classical pragmatists that certainly needs more advocates today.)

Perhaps just because the attempt to show that the “logical” or linguistic properties of value sentences support emotivism has collapsed (it was brilliantly criticized as early as 1960 by Paul Ziff in the final chapter of his Semantic Analysis), philosophers who deny that value propositions can genuinely state knowable facts more and more rely on purely metaphysical arguments. Thus, the late John Mackie argued in a book rather provocatively titled Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1978) that although value sentences do indeed have the linguistic form of propositions, and are supposed to be capable of truth and falsity, warrant or lack of warrant, this is a metaphysical mistake. According to Mackie’s famous “error theory” all ethical talk rests on an error. The supposed error is the belief that there could be such properties as good and evil, right and wrong. Although Mackie published this claim 13 years after Dewey’s death, it is safe to assume that Dewey would demand a reason for this claim. And the only reason Mackie offered was that these ethical properties are too “queer” to exist (Mackie 1978, 41)!

Mackie, (who was a metaphysical materialist), tried to prove ethical properties exhibited this “queerness” by pointing to a property that he claimed ethical judgments possess: namely, that one cannot make an ethical judgment and mean it as a sincere ethical judgment, unless one thereby expresses an actual desire or preference. (The British philosopher Richard Hare earlier made the same assumption, and also came to the conclusion that ethical sentences do not state facts, although he did not speak of an “error.”) Since descriptions of fact cannot, according to Mackie and Hare, be expressions of actual desires and preferences, it follows that ethical judgments are not descriptions of fact. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The origin of this supposed property of ethical judgments is clear: it comes from the older emotivism of the logical positivists! For the logical...